Create CSV in memory, email, and remove from memory

Question

private function convert_to_csv($input_array, $output_file_name, $delimiter) {

    $temp_memory = fopen(\'php://memory\',\'w\');

    foreach ($input_array as $line) {
         


        

Answer 1

I would make use PHP's temp fopen wrapper together with threshold of memory like this:

// we use a threshold of 1 MB (1024 * 1024), it's just an example
$fd = fopen('php://temp/maxmemory:1048576', 'w');
if ($fd === false) {
    die('Failed to open temporary file');
}

$headers = array('id', 'name', 'age', 'species');
$records = array(
    array('1', 'gise', '4', 'cat'),
    array('2', 'hek2mgl', '36', 'human')
);

fputcsv($fd, $headers);
foreach($records as $record) {
    fputcsv($fd, $record);
}

rewind($fd);
$csv = stream_get_contents($fd);
fclose($fd); // releases the memory (or tempfile)

The memory treshold is 1MB. If the CSV file get's larger, PHP would create a temporary file, otherwise all will happen in memory. The advantage is that large CSV files won't exhaust the memory.

About your second question, fclose() will release the memory.

I once wrote a blog article regarding to this, you may find it interesting: http://www.metashock.de/2014/02/create-csv-file-in-memory-php/